If there are particular questions you want answered, it never hurts to reiterate them in a comment like this

This is true, but not I think in the way you meant.

Probably worth going into on a future livestream in more detail, but we have teams which are effectively "ringfenced" (I know, horrible corpo term) to specific work - live ops, ninja and episodic. For the ninja and episodic teams, our remit isn't to produce money directly, but to make the game better in such a way that players want to subscribe.

As such, we're always trying to assign time in the best way we can. We want that ninja and episodic dev time being prioritised to the thing we think will make players enjoy, and play, the game. In that sense, we always want to maximise the return on investment, but we don't (and can't really) measure that directly in dollars.

There are a few answers to this but they're both essentially variations on there being specific people who work on specific things.

Firstly, MTX stuff can be complicated to answer, and Mod MIC is one of the few people who can answer authoritatively, so when he's on it makes sense to ask him those questions. I, or for example some member of the combat council or lore council, probably couldn't give any useful info.

Secondly, it's a matter of prioritisation within the teams - the live ops team don't (usually) work on general content, and vice versa the episodic team don't touch live ops projects. This means that those teams are only prioritising within their own area of specialisation.

Thirdly, the nature of those two types of content is really different, which affects how the second point plays out in practice. There is simply less total live ops content than episodic content, which means not only less issues to deal with, but also each issue is individually easier to fix (on average) because again (on average) it touches less other systems.

On top of that, with the way Treasure Hunter works, that team is often only dealing with a single promotion at a time, whereas episodic content is mostly intended to go into game and stay in game. This means that the current promotion's issues aren't fighting for priority against every other update ever released.

Making that even more complex, different players consider different parts of the game critically in need of attention. For some players, that the new content isn't better than old content is a critical issue that needs resolving (i.e. why isn't the new drop good enough, buff it). For others, that old content has been eclipsed by new content is a critical issue that needs resolving (i.e. Raksha drop table isn't good enough anymore, buff it). In truth neither of these issues are critical, and neither needs to be resolved within 48 hours. (I don't mean here to imply that you thought they did.)

The implication of the way you've phrased your question is that while MTX issues are resolved promptly, content issues are just left to fester, but this simply isn't true. While there are many issues (some debateable, some not) there are devs working constantly to fix them - it's just a question of prioritising their impact, replicability, time to fix, etc. A factor that would get taken into account here is something like time limited content - which would include a typical promotion, but also certain types of content. There's no point scheduling a fix two weeks later if the content will be gone in a week.

To be honest I don't think either of these is really a good topic for a general Q&A stream. The best thing to do is report them through the in-game bug feature. We have QA assigned time every week to process and try to replicate these issues, where they get prioritised and assigned to devs.

I'm not a developer, but my instinct is that the former is probably not that hard to fix, but also not that important to fix, so it might not get prioritised. The latter sounds like something more complex - when you report it, include as much info as you can so it can be replicated.

I gave a longer response to a similar concern here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/tlu2ks/tldw_536_march_general_qa/i1zb8r5/

Yeah that makes sense. I can't see an obvious place to do that off the top of my head, but I'll try to bear it in mind.

I don't really get this take. Did you watch the stream, or is this in response to the TLDR?

I don't really agree with your take on PVP. While you're right that it's dominant in online spaces, that doesn't mean it's the right choice for every game - which essentially means that it may not be the right choice for the playerbase of every game.

The internet is littered with PVP tie-ins for what are fundamentally single player games. If I want to buy Resident Evil Village, I also get some multiplayer version I have no intention of ever installing or playing. GTA Online and Fallout 76 have fanbases constantly asking where the next main series single player game is coming from.

The thing about competitive online games is that they depend on an aggregate critical mass of players to work. If I want to play, say, Resident Evil Zero (or One Small Favour for that matter) I can just go and go that, but if I want to play the multiplayer mode for Resident Evil 6 (or Castle Wars) then I need there to be people online around to do that with.

Ofc RS isn't a single player game, but a large part of our playerbase treat it like one. Consistently over the years players have rejected our attempts to entice new PVP activity. You can criticise the design of the modes themselves, but I'd argue that there are literally thousands of very well designed PVP games out there that no one is playing. The quality of the game itself isn't the primary determinant.

My personal take on this is that over the years RS has refined the things that it's good at, and retained the players who like those things, and shed the players who are into things other games do better. Back in '05 when RS was the only game in town, people who liked PVP would PVP in RS because RS was their only option. However, most of those players moved on to other games as the aggregate critical mass moved, and other games became available. You can see a similar effect with social media - people who hung out in the lobby in RS because it was their primary chat client have moved on to discord, etc.

The players we've retained and continue to retain are the ones invested in long term progression mechanics (like skills and gear) because that's something RS does very well, and can continue to do very well even if there are other games doing the same thing (and I'd argue, not often as well).

Anyway my point is that while PVP is unarguably a popular thing in general, I don't think it follows that RS can or should attract or retain a PVP audience.

While there are many issues (some debateable, some not) there are devs working constantly to fix them - it's just a question of prioritising their impact, replicability, time to fix, etc.

Of the examples you gave, it's ridiculous hyperbole to call the scripture and trim comp "emergencies". I don't mean to say they're not important at all, and should never be looked at, but the comparison we're making here is with some blocker bug.

With scripture, and also with AG, safecracking and even EDs, it may be that content is crowding out other content, but it's also always been the case in RS that shutting the gate after the horse has bolted has produced resentment. Maybe it's still the right call, but that makes it significantly more complicated to fix than just some bug.

Looking around at people's attitudes to safecracking, I can't see a general sentiment of dissatisfaction. Now that might be an incorrect assessment and even so you might also say well of course players love broken things, that doesn't mean you shouldn't nerf them, and you might be right, but it makes it a significantly more complicated question.

Back when Runespan happened, we took a pretty stern reaction to it, and nerfed it to the ground. The response was very negative, and we ended up buffing it again so that it became the defacto levelling method for the skill. Some players like that, some players hate that, but methods crowding out other methods isn't in and of itself a problem at all, let alone a critical one.

The most famous example I can think of off the top of my head where it clearly was an actual error rather than just "balancing a player feels is wrong" is drygores, which were vastly too accessible due to a mistake in how difficult they were to obtain. I pitched fixes to this a few times, but the general takeaway was that the damage was done, and nerfing it after a long time wasn't doing anything to fix the problem except to punish players who had missed the opportunity.

I'm not saying that same logic applies in all the case you've listed, but these are not simple problems to fix - not because the actual technical work is hard, but because investigating and designing the right solution is time consuming. That doesn't mean they're not important, but it does affect the impact/fix time I mentioned earlier.

ED trash farming has a similar issue. You say it's causing "significant inflation" and you're probably right, but the basic fact of the game is that players will farm whatever is the best source of cash, so the question isn't how much is coming into the game, but how much is coming in compared to the next best option, and whether that gap is too large. Again that's a complex question, not a simple one. Is it "too easy"? Probably. Would it make the game better to change it? Again, probably, at least in an abstract sense. Will it make players happier if we fix it? I'm not convinced that's necessarily the case.

The general problem of inflation and raw gold is one that I'm constantly bothered by, and often spending time looking at, but it's on the same table as literally everything else. Personally I'm in favour of more aggressive nerfs for stuff, but my personal take doesn't determine how we resolve issues any more than yours does. You can see my solutions to things like raw cash drops, and how well they've gone down (not well).

"great idea, we'll make this a priority since so many people are asking for it"

"what a great idea, I'll get those in the next patch notes since the community really wants to see this"

See this is the part that confuses me. Just because something is asked in a Q&A doesn't mean it's the thing that the community most wants. When devs work on ninja strikes, part of what they do is gather multiple suggestions and try to evaluate which suggestions would provide the most value for players compared to the time spent implementing them. That determination takes time, sometimes even technical investigation or balancing input on whether it's even something we should do. It's not something that can, or should, be just promised off the cuff because the guy on the livestream liked the sound of it.

For your other suggestion, I kinda agree but I guess it's a question of what the Q&As are for. In general I don't think, and it sounds like you don't think, that a Q&A is a very good way of gathering or answering requests to fix content. I'm confused though by you saying "do away with the ninja team" because assigning people specific time to look into things and fix them is what you want.

Is it the themed strikes you don't like? I can see why, but my understanding is that working in that way allows the team to get a lot more done in the same time, since related fixes will have related design and technical issues so by investigating one, they can investigate them all at once.

I can't really answer the former, but to the latter:

It's super complicated and there are a lot of factors. I guess the key thing to say is that the episodic team is bigger. We actually have a lot of devs right now working on a lot of content. However, if you know anything about people management you know that it doesn't scale linearly. More staff means more coordination, more meetings, more project managers, more line managers (who are also devs now spending dev time on management), etc etc. The increase in effectiveness per additional developer drops pretty significantly.

On top of that, content developer is actually quite a demanding role. Runescape is a complex, storied game and our content developers have a very wide purview - they're expected to be game designers, good scripters, project managers, deal with players, write dialogue, etc etc. Sometimes we'll let some areas slide if we get a candidate who is very strong in other areas (for example a great designer and scripter who's never touched RS before, or an RS expert who has some but not all relevant dev skills) but in general we're not drowning in qualified candidates. It's not really a matter of pay either, as RS works sufficiently differently to other games due to its long history and very particular playerbase that industry experience on other games doesn't always count as much as it might.

Also just, more generally, and kinda related to the first point, is that Jagex is a company with lots of departments and people who handle different things. Budgets and headcounts and things have to be approved by finance people. Kinda like the first point, past a certain point in company size you just have to do this stuff in a professional way and that inevitably just makes things more complicated. This wouldn't be the case if we were like an indie bedroom company, but if we were an indie bedroom company we wouldn't be talking about hiring more staff.

The anecdote I have about this is that we do occasionally hire devs from other MMO companies and one that joined us was shocked by how large our live team was. His previous game was running with a live team about a quarter of the size of ours. I don't mean by that "omg RS players, so lucky" but more that we're definitely not trying to skimp anyone.

Look I understand the points you're raising, and I don't even disagree with... any of them I think, but you're raising them as examples of critical fixes with a 48 hour turnaround and that's simply not the case. They're complex, endemic, long-term design issues which need to be addressed in largely all existing and ongoing content. We can't just pay a dev overtime for one weekend and knock them all out in one go. The fact that you raised five separate issues simply proves the point I made initially that MTX bugs can be fixed faster because there are less of them and they're simpler. My claim was never "we always fix everything immediately" - of course we don't, we couldn't, and no one ever could. I was responding specifically to a point about the comparative effort put into live ops and episodic content, and how that could happen.

I understand that you're frustrated when something you consider extremely important isn't being prioritised. I'm not even saying you're wrong, it might be that the issues you care about are the critical priority for the game. Elsewhere in the thread I have Rubic saying something similar about PVP. Somewhere else I have someone else saying that the livestream was "sh*tty" because we didn't their specific question about a minor bug.

"Work has to be prioritised" is a basic fact of software engineering and paraphrasing that as "muh game design is hard" is just not very constructive.

Multiplayer and PVP aren't the same thing in this context. My example would have worked better if I'd said that something like Resident Evil is a non-PVP game, rather than a single player game. I don't at all think it's the case that RS isn't a multiplayer game. That said the basic question of whether the game should include forced multiplayer content is quite a controversial one, and we had multiple questions about it during the Q&A.

Except that's not what I'm saying. I'm not talking about what players should do, I'm talking about what I believe they already have done.

You might say well, if you went back 10 years and changed the focus of the game quite dramatically at that time, things would be different now, and I agree. Maybe it's the case that focusing on e.g. skillcapes and virtual 120s etc was the path of least resistance at the time, and it didn't have to be like that. You might be right. In fact you'd definitely be right by my own logic - if RS in 2010 was a sh*t hot PVP game but kinda meh at skilling, then we'd keep PVP players and lose progression minded players.

Even so though, there aren't many PVP games from 20 years ago that are still massively popular today. This is the point I originally made to Rubic, and the point you clipped out of your summary of what I said. Again my personal take, not policy, but I think if RS 10 years ago had focused on PVP to the exclusion of PVM and skilling, it would be in a worse position now.

AFAIK it really depends on the dev. Not just ninja strikes, but just in general when some time is allotted for fixes (this often happens when someone is working on something related) they're either coming to the project with an existing strong sense of what needs doing, or they need to gather info. Sometimes they'll research existing stuff, other times they'll post on twitter or reddit or something to gather ideas and then prioritise them.

The ingame bugfix tool is used. We should get QA to do a stream about it some time explaining the process and what happens, but it actually gets specific time allotted weekly both for processing bugs and for fixing them.

I'm not involved in this process directly so I can't speak to what bugs are and aren't getting prioritised. As with everything, we can spend more time on prioritisation to prioritise better, but that's then less time spent on actually fixing bugs. Hard to get the right balance.

Well, that's a separate but good question. I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive, and I don't think we have to rule PVP out permanently. However that's separate from the status of the wilderness, which is a very specific kind of PVP. The most well regarded PVP content I can think of in recent memory was WE2, which is still highly regarded internally.

I corrected myself on stream from something like "remove PVP" to "make PVP optional" (I don't have time to go look up my exact words right now) for exactly that reason. It could be, for example, that the Wilderness has open PVP enabled on some worlds but not others, and that playing on an open PVP world gives small bonuses. Whether PKing should be mechanically incentivised is a whole other question, but in principle it's a way to both "reclaim" the wilderness but also retain the option to PVP.

Yeah that's a great point.